Israel’s Road to “Convergence”
Began with Rabin by Jonathan Cook
www.dissidentvoice.org
May 12, 2006

With
his coalition partners on board, Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert is
plotting his next move: a partial withdrawal from the West Bank over the
next few years which he and his government will declare as the end of the
occupation and therefore also any legitimate grounds for Palestinian
grievance.

From
hereon in, Israel will portray itself as the benevolent provider of a
Palestinian state -- on whatever is left after most of Israel’s West Bank
colonies have been saved and the Palestinian land on which they stand
annexed to Israel. If the Palestinians reject this deal -- an offer, we
will doubtless be told, is every bit as “generous” as the last one --
then, according to the new government’s guidelines, they will be shunned
by Israel and presumably also by the international community.

Even
given the normal wretched standards of Israeli double-dealing in the
“peace process,” this is a bleak moment to be a Palestinian politician.

Olmert’s “convergence” plan, his version of disengagement for the West
Bank (except this time only about 15 per cent of the territory’s 420,000
settlers will be withdrawn) has salved the West’s conscience just as
surely as did his predecessor Sharon’s pullout from Gaza last year. The
naysayers will be dismissed, as they were then, as bad-sports,
anti-Semites or apologists for terror.

Olmert
is not new to this game. In fact, there is every indication that he played
a formative role in helping Sharon transform himself from “the Bulldozer”
into “the Unilateral Peacemaker”.

In
November 2003 Olmert, Sharon’s deputy, all but announced the coming Gaza
Disengagement Plan before it had earned the official name. A few weeks
before Sharon revealed that he would be pulling out of Gaza, Olmert
outlined to Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper the most serious issue
facing Israel. It was, he said, the problem of how, when the Palestinians
were on the eve of becoming a majority in the region, to prevent them from
launching a struggle similar to the one against apartheid waged by black
South Africans.

Olmert’s concern was that, if the Palestinian majority renounced violence
and began to fight for one-man-one-vote, Israel would be faced by “a much
cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle -- and ultimately a much
more powerful one”. Palestinian peaceful resistance, therefore, had to be
pre-empted by Israel.

The
logic of Olmert’s solution, as he explained it then, sounds very much like
the reasoning behind disengagement and now convergence: “[The] formula for
the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of
Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians.” Or, as he put last week,
“division of the land, with the goal of ensuring a Jewish majority, is
Zionism’s lifeline.”

But
though Olmert has claimed convergence as his own, its provenance in the
Israeli mainstream dates back more than a decade. Far from being a
response to Palestinian terror during this intifada, as government
officials used to maintain, many in the Israeli military and political
establishment have been pushing for “unilateral separation” -- a
withdrawal, partial or otherwise, from the occupied territories made
concrete and irreversible by the building of a barrier -- since the early
1990s.

The
apostles of separation, however, failed to get their way until now because
of two obstacles: the cherished, but conflicting, dreams of the Labor and
Likud parties, both of which preferred to postpone, possibly indefinitely,
the endgame of the conflict implicit in a separation imposed by Israel.

In
signing up to Oslo, Yitzhak Rabin and his Labor party believed they could
achieve effective separation by other means, through the manufactured
consent of the Palestinians. Rabin hoped to subcontract Israel’s security
to the Palestinian leadership in the shape of the largely dependent regime
of the Palestinian Authority, under Yasser Arafat.

Palestinians resisting the occupation would be cowed by their own security
forces, doing Israel’s bidding, while Israel continued plundering
resources -- land and water -- in the West Bank and Gaza and established a
network of industrial parks in which Israeli employers could exploit the
captive Palestinian labour force too.

Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu and the Likud party, on the other hand, refused
throughout the 1990s to countenance a separation that would foil their
ambitions of annexing all of the occupied territories and creating Greater
Israel. Sharon notoriously told his settler followers to “go grab the
hilltops” in 1998 in an attempt to thwart the small territorial gains
being made by the Palestinians under the Oslo agreements.

In the
tradition of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Likud rejected Labor’s optimistic
view that the Palestinians could be made willing accomplices to their
dispossession. In this view, because they would always struggle for their
freedom, the Palestinians had to be ruthlessly subjugated or expelled.
Which of these two courses to follow has been the paralyzing dilemma faced
by Likud ever since.

So for
a decade, separation was mostly forced on to the backburner.

But
not entirely. Rabin, it seems, was fully aware that the Oslo scam might
not work quite as Israel planned. In that case, to avert the threat of the
apartheid comparison, Rabin believed he would need to fall back on a wall
to enforce a separation between the land’s Jewish and Palestinian
inhabitants.

He
made this clear to Dennis Ross, Clinton’s Middle East envoy during the
Oslo period. Ross admitted as much in 2004 when he told Thomas Friedman of
TheNew York Times that shortly before Rabin’s murder in
1995 the Israeli prime minister began contemplating building a wall as a
way to contain the demographic threat posed by Israel’s continuing
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

“[Rabin] said, ‘We’re going to have to partition -- there’s going to have
to be a partition here, because we won’t be Jewish and democratic if we
don’t have a partition.’ Now, his preference was to negotiate the
partition peacefully to produce two states. But if that didn’t work he
wanted, as you put it, a separation fence or barrier to create what would
be two states, or at least to preserve Israel as a state.”

In
truth, Rabin was more persuaded of the need for a wall than Ross cares to
remember. At a time when the ink on the Oslo agreements had barely dried,
Rabin was entrusting the wall project to a committee headed by his public
security minister, Moshe Shahal.

Though
the scheme was dropped by his two successors, Shimon Peres and Binyamin
Netanyahu, it came of age again with Ehud Barak, a long-time Oslo skeptic,
who entered office advocating unilateral separation. In May 2000, he put
his ideas into practice by unilaterally withdrawing troops from Israel’s
“security zone” in south Lebanon.

And
two months later, a fortnight before departing for talks at Camp David, he
articulated his vision of separation from the Palestinians: “Israel will
insist upon a physical separation between itself and the independent
Palestinian entity to be formed as a result of the settlement. I am
convinced that a separation of this sort is necessary for both sides.”

In
fact, Barak had been secretly devising a plan to “separate physically”
from the Palestinians for some time. Uzi Dayan, the army’s chief of staff
at the time, says he persuaded Barak of the need for unilateral
disengagement “as a safety net to Camp David”.

Ephraim Sneh, Barak’s deputy defense minister confirms Dayan’s account,
saying he was asked to prepare the plans for separation in case Camp David
failed. “I drew the map. I can speak about it authoritatively. The plan
means the de facto annexation of 30 percent of the West Bank, half in the
Jordan Valley, which you have to keep if there is no agreement, and half
in the settlement blocs.”

Shlomo
Ben Ami, Barak’s foreign minister, was given a sneak preview of the map:
“[Barak] was proud of the fact that his map would leave Israel with about
a third of the territory [the West Bank] … Ehud was convinced that the map
was extremely logical. He had a kind of patronizing, wishful-thinking,
naive approach, telling me enthusiastically, ‘Look, this is a state; to
all intents and purposes it looks like a state’.”

It
seems that Barak hoped to get the Palestinians to agree to the terms of
this map or else impose it by force. But, following the collapse of the
Camp David talks, Barak never got the chance to begin building his wall.
Within a few months he would be ousted from office, and Ariel Sharon would
be installed as the new prime minister.

In
keeping with his Greater Israel ambitions, Sharon was initially skeptical
about both separation and erecting a wall. When he approved the barrier’s
first stages near Jenin in summer 2002, it was under pressure from the
Labor party, which was shoring up the legitimacy of the national unity
government as his military armor rampaged through the occupied
territories.

Many
senior Labor figures had been converted to the idea of a wall by Barak,
who relentlessly promoted unilateral separation while out of office. In
one typical commentary in June 2002, some 18 months before Sharon’s own
proposals for disengagement were revealed, Barak wrote: “The disengagement
would be implemented gradually over several years. The fence should
include the seven big settlement blocs that spread over 12 or 13 percent
of the area and contain 80 percent of the settlers. Israel will also need
a security zone along the Jordan River and some early warning sites, which
combined will cover another 12 percent, adding up to 25 percent of the
West Bank.”

And
what about East Jerusalem, where Israel is trying to wrestle control from
the Palestinians? “In Jerusalem, there would have to be two physical
fences,” Barak advised. “The first would delineate the political boundary
and be placed around the Greater City, including the settlement blocs
adjacent to Jerusalem. The second would be a security-dictated barrier,
with controlled gates and passes, to separate most of the Palestinian
neighborhoods from the Jewish neighborhoods and the Holy Basin, including
the Old City.”

In
other words, Barak’s public vision of disengagement four years ago is
almost identical to Olmert’s apparently freshly minted convergence plan
for the West Bank.

Olmert’s predecessor, Sharon, was not an instant convert to the benefits
of Barak’s ideas of separation. Though he needed to keep the Labor party
sweet, progress on the early sections of the wall was painfully slow. Uzi
Dayan, the general behind Barak’s separation plans, complained that Sharon
and his defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, were trying to sabotage the wall.
They were “not working on the fence,” he said. “They are trying not to do
it.”

All
that changed at some point in early 2003, when Sharon began talking about
Palestinian statehood for the first time. By May 2003, he was telling a
stunned Likud party meeting: “The idea that it is possible to continue
keeping 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation -- yes, it is
occupation, you might not like the word, but what is happening is
occupation -- is bad for Israel, and bad for the Palestinians, and bad for
the Israeli economy. Controlling 3.5 million Palestinians cannot go on
forever.”

The
reason for Sharon’s change of heart related mainly to a belated
realization on his part that the demographic threats facing Israel could
no longer be denied. Israel ruling over a majority of Palestinians would
inevitably provoke the apartheid comparison and spell the end of the
Jewish state’s legitimacy.

Also,
Sharon had been backed into an uncomfortable corner by the Road Map, a US
peace initiative unveiled in late 2002 that, unusually, required major
concessions from Israel as well as the Palestinians, promised a
Palestinian state at its outcome and was to be overseen by the Europeans,
Russians and the United Nations as well as the Americans.

A year
later, Olmert would be flying his trial balloon for a Likud-style
separation on far better terms for Israel than the Road Map. And shortly
after that, disengagement was officially born. It was, said Dov Weisglass,
Sharon’s adviser, “formaldehyde” for the Road Map.

It is
clear that Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza was only ever the first stage
of his separation plans. His officials repeatedly warned that further
disengagements, from the West Bank, would follow, based on the route of
the wall, though Sharon -- cautious about alienating rightwing voters
before the coming elections -- was more tight-lipped.

But
when Sharon finally realized he could not tame the Greater Israel diehards
in his Likud party, and that they threatened to unravel his plans for the
West Bank, he created Kadima, a new “centrist” party that attracted
fugitives from both Labor and Likud.

Its
rapid success derived from its ability to transcend the enduring
differences between the Israeli left and right -- or, rather, to
consolidate both traditions. Like Likud, Kadima admitted that the
Palestinians would never surrender their dreams of nationhood, but like
Labor it believed a strategy could be devised in which the Palestinians,
even if they did not accept the terms of separation, could be made
powerless to resist Israeli diktats.

Kadima
squared the circle through a policy that maintained Likud's insistence on
"unilateralism" while maintaining Labor's pretence of benevolent
"separation" from the Palestinians.

Before
his conversion, Sharon was the last and the biggest hurdle to unilateral
separation. His opposition was enough throughout the 1990s to stymie those
in the security establishment -- possibly a majority -- who were pushing
for the policy. Once he backed down, nothing was likely to stand in the
way of implementing separation.

The
lesson of the Gaza disengagement is that withdrawals (partial or full)
from occupied territory are insufficient in themselves to herald the end
of occupation. The absence of Israeli settlers and soldiers from those
parts of the West Bank to be handed over to the Palestinians will not
ensure that the Palestinian people are sovereign in the territory left to
them.

The
occupation will continue as long as Israel controls the diminished West
Bank’s borders and trade, its resources and airspace, its connections with
Gaza and the Palestinian Diaspora, and as long as Israel blocks the
emergence of a Palestinian army and enjoys the unfettered right to strike
at Palestinian targets, military or otherwise.

Olmert
and Israel’s security establishment understand this all too well.
Unfortunately, a supine Europe and America appear all too ready to collude
in the deception.